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case of the saṅgha in Sri Lanka. As important as the early developments discussed in part 1 were for establishing important soteriological patterns and concerns that would continue in the tradition’s history, they did not fully account for the models that Theravāda Buddhists have created for ideal religious types, nor did they provide any final, universally agreed upon solution to the always burning Buddhist question concerning which mode of bhāvanā (“religious cultivation”) most effectively conduces to realization of the final goal of liberation. Because of developments in Theravāda history that will be discussed in chapter 5, matters pertaining to perpetuation of the Buddha’s teaching and its institutional carriers came to be considered alongside those concerning the individual pursuit of liberation, and consequently the major decision facing the religious virtuoso shifted from a choice regarding which one of the noble persons’ paths to follow to a choice regarding which one of two monastic vocations to adopt. Growing out of debates in the first century BCE in Sri Lanka that resulted in a bifurcation between the pursuits of “learning” (pariyatti) and “practice” (paṭipatti), a vocational split occurred between those who would take up the residential vocation of “forest-dwelling” (āraññavāsi) and its corresponding occupational vocations of meditation (vipassanādhura) and asceticism (paṁsukūlika) on the one hand and those who would take up the residential vocation of “village-dwelling” (gāmavāsi) and its corresponding occupational vocations of scholarship (ganthadhura) and preaching (dhammakathika) on the other. This division over what constitutes the best religious career, which marks the history of the saṅgha from the time of that first-century BCE controversy up through the early modern period, will be the focus of part 2, chapter 5.
Chapter 6 examines an important modern debate in the Theravāda world, in which the issue of which meditative path to follow is revisited and the tensions between approaches that are based in samatha practice and those that eschew samatha almost entirely in favor of a practice of vipassanā only come to the surface once again. Since the late nineteenth century, there has arisen—in opposition to the orthodox voice